Burtonian Tutorials on the Kynetx Rule Language

Craig Burton has been busy the last few weeks cranking out tutorials on how to use KRL--the Kynetx Rule Langauge--in certain situations.

What would a programming language introducation be without a "hello world" example and Craig delivers. The first tutorial anyone ought to watch is Hello World, which gives a video view of the instructions here.

After that simple introduction, Craig goes right to the heart of the features that are important for creating useful Kynetx apps. The second tutorial is on External Data. In this tutorial, Craig extends the Hello World tutorial to use an external file as the source of the data displayed.

The second tutorial's data is just HTML--non-structured--so the third tutorial rectifies that and redoes the program to Using JSON Data. This tutorial contains some interesting techniques like using Yahoo! Pipes to convert CSV data into JSON. Craig put notifications on three Web sites based on the data in the JSON.

The fourth tutorial, Pipes, Pick and Google Docs, shows how to place the data in a Google spreadsheet, turn it into JSON, and use KRL's support for JSONPath (think XPAth for JSON) to grab data out of te JSON and use it in augmenting three sites.

The third and fourth tutorials used three rules to put notifications on three Web sites. That's not really making good use of the data, so the fifth tutorial, Dynamic Data and Dynamic Rule, fixes that by using the pick operator in a more sophisticated way to pick the right data out of the JSON using the domain of the site that the rule is firing on. This way a single, data-driven rule does the whole job. I wrote more about how this works last week.

By the time you're done watching these five tutorials, each around 5 minutes, you'll have a good idea how to use structured data in augmenting Web pages. Craig plans on continuing the series and I'm anxious to see where he takes it. I'd love to see more detailed looks at actions, callbacks, postludes, and persistent variables.